Linguistic Landscaping

The first example is from a Facebook post, discussing a car park sign at a local su-permarket in Niebüll. The pictured sign gives notice in both German and Frisian that illegally parked cars will be towed away (Figure 1):

The photo was posted on a personal Facebook wall with the question in Frisian:

“Who translated this? Shouldn’t it bestönjeand notstünje?” This triggered a short trail of responses from the poster’s Facebook friends (Figure 2), mostly in Frisian, who are all well-known as active members of the Frisian-speaking community.

The trigger for their comments relates to the use ofstünjeinstead ofstönjein the translation ofstehen(‘to stand’, here: ‘to be parked’).¹⁵We present the beginning of the exchange in translation:

A: Who translated this? Shouldn’t it bestönjeinstead ofstünje? When you use Frisian, it should be correct Frisian

B: A, is this really important? I don’t think so. What is correct Frisian meant to be? It would certainly not be good if our school teachers prescribe, what they, from their vantage point of the pulpit, believe to be “correct” Frisian.

15It was impossible to find out who provided the translation for the car park sign, despite sev-eral attempts to contact the manager of the supermarket.stönjeis the form listed in the most commonly used dictionary but both forms,stünjeandstönje, are attested in Bökingharde Fri-sian, with the “incorrect”stünjeattested for Niebüll, the location of the supermarket, in Walker (1980: 247; with thanks to Temmo Bosse (Flensburg) for helping us find this reference).

.

Figure 1: Sign at the car park of a supermarket in Niebüll (post on a personal Facebook timeline)

C: Yes, B; but A isn’t just a school teacher but also a native speaker. But I believe that we should be happy [satisfied] when people speak or write something in Frisian of their own accord. One wouldn’t ever learn correct Danish or English. And wouldn’t have the ambition to do so, either. You couldn’t force people to do anything anyway. “Bad Frisian or no Frisian.”

C: P.S. Fleeted also isn’t “correct”. I myself grew up withfleete, fleet, fleet, fleet[= ablaut forms].

The three commentators are all native speakers of Mainland North Frisian, with speaker A a school teacher of Frisian, speaker B a leading participant in the ethnic and political discourse on the Frisian minority and speaker C a well-known literary scholar and poet of Frisian, who produced an influential dictio-nary of Mainland North Frisian in the early 1970s. All are university-educated and take part in writing competitions and/or publish their own short stories and poetry in Frisian but none of them are academic linguists.

In this Facebook exchange they argue about the need for using Frasch, their dialect of Frisian, “correctly” on public signage as shown above. A point of dis-pute in this conversation is the impact of correcting people’s Frisian. It is argued

Speaker A A

B Speaker B Speaker A

Speaker C B A

Speaker C C

C

Figure 2: Facebook comments on the picture in Figure 1 (post on a per-sonal Facebook timeline)

by speakers B and C that not only is it unclear who would have the authority to adjudicate on what is correct but also that being corrected might be a deterrent to potential speakers. Speaker C summarizes this succinctly as: better “bad Fri-sian than no FriFri-sian”, referring implicitly to the book title by (Sjölin 1976), who investigated language mixing in West Frisian.¹⁶ In subsequent lines of this ex-change, not quoted here, speaker B re-emphasizes that being a native speaker of Frisian should not be seen as a license to correct other people’s Frisian. In re-sponse, Speaker A claims to be misunderstood – they had simply wished to point out that the translator of the sign should have consulted a native speaker or a dictionary. Speaker B then points out that there is no institution or dictionary for Frisian that provides binding guidance in such language matters. Speaker B reiterates that it is preferable for people to feel encouraged to write rather than not write at all for fear of making a mistake.

This exchange summarizes some of the key issues in the lay-linguistic dis-course on minority languages: in acknowledgement that smaller languages

typi-16Min frysk(‘bad Frisian’) = everyday, spoken language, considered to be a variety of lesser quality; in opposition to theechte Fries, the real Frisian, used in formal writing (Sjölin 1976: 13).

cally do not feature in the public written domain, it is generally applauded when the language is used in linguistic landscapes. However, as soon as there is visible display of the language, issue of language norms and correctness appear: writing has often been reserved only for the most formal, correct or prestigious variety of a language.¹⁷ In consequence, the expectation of the reader is such that writ-ing in smaller languages will comply with this pattern, given that s/he, like the three speakers in the exchange above, will have obtained their literacy through the medium of a highly codified language, in this case High German.

There is the additional tension about who has the authority to say what is correct and what is not. In the exchange, all three refer to two types of norm authorities: the judgement of native speakers and the prescriptions provided in reference works. In the case of Mooring, the dialect discussed here, there is a widely-used, explicitlydescriptivedictionary,¹⁸which is commonly regarded as authorative and sometimes referred to as the Frisian Duden (see §5.3.2 below), after the dictionary of German which is commonly perceived to be providing clear judgement on what is correct German and what is not.